Clustered longitudinal data is often collected as repeated measurements on subjects over time arising in the clusters. Examples include longitudinal community intervention studies, or family studies with repeated measures on each member. Meanwhile,...
For complex classification systems, data is usually gathered from multiple sources of information that have varying degree of reliability. In fact, assuming that the different sources have the same relevance in describing all the data might lead to...
Images, Photographic--Databases; Image processing--Digital techniques; Data mining; Cluster analysis
The performance of content-based image retrieval systems has proved to be inherently constrained by the used low level features, and cannot give satisfactory results when the user's high level concepts cannot be expressed by low level features. In...
Optimizing queries in a distributed database is quite difficult. This work proposes defining new generalized quantifiers which operate on sets rather than tuples. These quantifiers would allow for easier optimization in a horizontally distributed...
The purpose of this dissertation is to find ways to decrease Medicare costs and to study health outcomes of diabetes patients as well as to investigate the influence of Medicare, part D since its introduction in 2006 using the CMS CCW (Chronic...
Longitudinal studies occupy an important role in scientific researches and clinical trials. When taking the analysis of longitudinal data, investigators are often confronted with missing data which will produce potential biases, even in...
Anxiety in children; Anxiety--Physiological aspects
Anxiety disorders are prevalent in both adult and child populations, and are associated with significant economic and psychosocial costs. There are clearly familial patterns of transmission within the anxiety disorders, and the inherited risk is...
In this dissertation research, we aim to solve problems of two types of survival data, clustered survival data with potentially informative cluster size and sojourn time data. The methods for these two types of data are different. However, both...
The complexity of high-dimensional data creates a number of concerns when trying to analyze it. This data often consists of a response or survival time and potentially thousands of predictors. These predictors can be highly correlated, and the...
Bartending--Technological innovations; Block diagrams; Quadratic assignment problem
Typically bartenders will arrange liquor bottles in a bar based on their own preferences. This research project describes an alternative way to arrange the bottles on the speed rail more efficiently. This will allow bartenders to make drinks...
Anxiety in adolescence; Parent and teenager; Parenting
This dissertation examined the prediction of anxiety symptoms over time during
developmentally significant periods - the transition to middle school (12 years old) and
the transition to high school (15 years old). Specifically, relationships...
The purpose of this research study is to examine the use of time series forecasting and text mining to investigate the prescription of antibiotics. The specific objective is to examine the relationship between the total payments, private insurance...
Item response theory; Goodness-of-fit tests; Monte Carlo method
Item response theory (IRT) is expanding to diverse research settings, without accompanying access to easily implemented model fit methods. One simple model fit approach involves x2/df ratios. However, its utility is not known across several...
A common problem faced by most organizations in today's world is one of worker-task assignments. Assigning a large number of complex tasks to workers at various training levels can be a complicated process which has the potential to cost or to save...
Marginal inference for waiting times in multi-stage time-to-event models is complicated by right censoring of observations as well as the prior history of events in the model. In general, complications arise due to the evolution of the censoring...
Worry in children; Anxiety in children; Cognition in children; Child psychology
Although worry is common in children, little is known about its development and maintenance. The current study reviews several areas of the literature to inform a comprehensive cognitive model of clinical worry in children. Parental influences on...
A hyper basis function network (HyperBF) is a generalized radial basis function network (RBF) where the activation function is a radial function of a weighted distance. The local weighting of the distance accounts for the variation in local scaling...
Medical records--Data processing; Data mining; Medical care--Data processing; Coronary heart disease--Treatment
The goal of this study is to use a data mining framework to assess the three main treatments for acute myocardial infarction: thrombolytic therapy, percutaneous coronary intervention (percutaneous angioplasty), and coronary artery bypass surgery....
Fiber-reinforced polymer matrix composites (PMCs) using high-temperature thermoplastics as the matrix material represent a lightweight design solution for applications above 250°F. This is often required for aircraft structures subjected to...
This study examined two questions related to interpersonal change as an outcome of Time-Limited Interpersonal Therapy (TLIPT). The first asked if clients experience both symptom change and interpersonal change when treated with TLIPT. The second...
